Page 22 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"I asked who the scarf was for." James looks at me then, glasses smudged, dirt on his cheek, gentle as a Sunday. "She said, 'Someone who doesn't know yet that she's cold.'"

The lane goes blurry. All that blue, swimming.

I have that scarf.

Unfinished, needles still in it, folded over the arm of Gran's rocking chair the day I came home. Periwinkle blue. My color. I picked it up and knew, the way you know your own name, that she'd been making it for me.

I set my coffee down before I drop it.

"She never finished it," I say.

"No." James pushes his glasses up. "She ran out of time before she ran out of yarn."

He holds pieces of her I will never get firsthand. This morning that doesn't ache. This morning it is a gift with my name on it, years late and right on time.

I kiss him. Dirt on his hands and all. He makes a surprised sound against my mouth and then his filthy fingers are careful in my hair like I'm the seedling.

"I'm going to finish it," I tell him, forehead to his. "The scarf. Someday."

"She'd like that." A pause. His voice goes earnest, worried, entirely James. "Rue. Do you think I spaced the seedlings too close? The packet said eight inches and I did six, and I've been sick about it."

I laugh so hard I have to put the mug down.

Eight months official, since the Harvest Festival. Eight months, and this is the best morning of the whole run. Maybe the best morning I can remember at all.

I don't trust mornings with no flaw in them. Today I let myself anyway.

***

He goes home at dusk with a casserole dish and a kiss at his truck. I carry both cold mugs back to the porch and don't go inside.

The light does what it does out here, going gold and then bruised, and the oak by the porch fills up with dark. I sit on the step. And I do the thing I do when it's only me.

I talk to Gran.

"He planted me a road," I tell the oak. "From my very first spring home, Gran. You knew, didn't you. You were making me a scarf and telling him my color and you knew."

The wind moves the branches. High up, something shifts its weight.

"It's going too well." I say it quiet, like the yard might carry tales. "You know I know what too-well looks like. I've seen it. I lived in it a whole year once with a smile on my face."

I wrap my arms around my knees.

"I keep waiting for the other shoe. Tell me there's no shoe."

The wind stops.

And from the black heart of that oak, the mockingbird laughs.

Not sings. Laughs. Gran's laugh, the low rolling one she saved for when I was being a fool in a way that entertained her, so exact that every hair on my arms stands straight up and my heart slams once against my ribs like a fist on a door.

"That's not funny," I tell the tree. My voice shakes on it.

The bird laughs again, softer, winding down the way she used to, and then the oak goes silent and it is only a tree in the dark, and I am only a woman on a porch step with two cold mugs of coffee.

I make myself stand. Make myself gather the mugs. Make myself walk to the door like a sensible person who knows a bird is a bird.

But my hand stalls on the knob, and I stand there in the last of the light with my skin still prickling, because I asked my grandmother a question and something in that tree answered.